Manulife Claim: Fill & Download for Free

Because Montreal was Canada’s New York.When operating vessels you sail them as far as you can before breaking bulk and unloading because water is the cheapest form of transport. So boats went up the river, to be stopped by the Lachine rapids; where they unloaded in what was a large major port. (Halifax remained a secondary port rather like Boston.)Montreal was the center of Canada, and it’s biggest city, till 1976 when the Provincial government, the newly elected Parti Quebecois (PQ), did the one thing that can kill a port - They announced intention to secede, and to become “Masters in their own House.” In short they loudly and publicly proclaimed intent to become parochial.This was an era - 1976 - of nationalization. In 1973 Saudi Arabia for example nationalized a healthy chunk of their oil industry by fiat. Furthermore in addition to being nationalist, the PQ was also avowed socialist. (Rather mild socialists but socialists nevertherless.)At that time Montreal was the cultural and social equivalent of NYC for Canada. The Jazz scene was world famous. As were other clubs and movements. Life Magazine as recently as the late ’60s was running features on things to do in the city. The proximity to NYC, the sharing of summer resort facility (the 1000 Islands) all made for a vibrant city.Those not ‘du pure laine’, descended from French pioneers, did the only sensible thing. They picked up and moved. Corporate headquarters did everything but jack up their highrises and ship them down the 401. Corporations like the Bank of Montreal and Manulife moved headquarters taking hundreds, if not thousands of jobs and dependent families with them.Ports are always international in flavour due to traffic. (Which is also why they are never religious centres: Rome, Jerusalem, Mecca are all inland from their port cities. It’s hard to insist you are pure and have the one best way, if you can find three or four different religions down at the docks, making the same claims.) If you want to be parochial you go inland. Demanding a port city become parochial is to insist it unplug from the trading grid.At the time all this happened, rail, road and air had not supplanted ocean travel but they were making it less important. (This would change again in another ten years when container traffic took over the world.)The explosive growth of Toronto in the next five years was astonishing. It eclipsed that of Calgary which was undergoing another oil boom at that time.Montreal visibly stagnated. Population growth dropped (as I recall, it even went negative for about 5 years.) Economic growth dropped, by any measure. The Montreal stock exchange became a rump exchange, only kept alive by government bargaining. (They extracted the options trade from the Toronto Exchange.) Visiting Montreal after Toronto in 1981, felt like visiting a different country, and a much poorer country at that.Halifax would be a logical second choice, except rail and road links to the rest of N. America are not great. So it was left to fester in its own parochial stew.Also as mentioned elsewhere in this thread, the trade agreements hammered out by Commonwealth early Canada did the Maritime provinces no favours.

Should be taken from the host country instead home country as any unexpected claim needs to be dealt at host country during your stay. There are many insurance companies you can call or even buy online. The best are sunlife, Manulife etc. Google it and you will find loads of them. I suggest to buy from Canada (perhaps online if you are here) and buy only for 1 year which meets the visa requirements. You can ask company to start the insurance from the day of landing and Traveler should carry insurance paper handy as sometimes immigration officer asks for it before stamping the passport. Best!

Look at the question. This is the exact reason why accepting insurance assignment is a headache.So as a dentist, how can you reliably give an exact cost (the word “estimate” may not hold the same meaning for patients) when you haven’t done the procedure yet. How can you allow for all the complications that can happen during treatment that changes what needs to be done. So now you hold the dentist accountable for additional costs to manage your dental problem. It’s about perception. You perceive “extra charges” rather than the dentist having to perform additional procedures to manage or complete the treatment to a satisfactory/ clinically acceptable level.An estimate is exactly what it is, an estimate, not the exact cost. This is healthcare service, not retail. As an analogy would be house renovations, where your contractor can only give an estimate for the work and if unexpected situations appear (mold, asbestos removal etc.) that was not foreseeable before starting, the estimate will change due to additional work required.A dental office can only give estimates and usually, they try their best to stay within that estimate, but it is not always possible. Any pre-determinations from the insurance company is also only an estimate and is not final until the procedure is completed and billed. The final adjudication from the insurance company does not have to match the estimate (pre-determination). What if you have to pay a deductible? What if your limit had been reached? What if something had been billed on that tooth from another office and the insurance company deducts the amount previously covered? What if the insurance company substituted the code (I call it bait and switch, but what they do is pay for a “similar” code that costs less even though that wasn’t the exact procedure). Sometimes the insurance companies impose a frequency or time limit on procedures. For example, certain Manulife policies will not pay for both periapical and bitewing films taken on the same day, even if it’s just one each, but in your policy they may tell you it’s 100% covered and they will tell you that when you call, but the fine print isn’t transparent until after the adjudication of the claim. So yes, send estimates all you want, but the actual claim payment may be different. The insurance policy is a contract between you and your insurance company only, not between the dentist and the insurance. It is usually an understanding in assigning insurance to a third party such as a dental office, that what the insurance does not pay for, the patient is responsible for paying. Your contract is with the dental office - the dentist performs the service, you are obliged to pay for those services.So if there are possible anticipated additional procedures, the office does their best to inform patients ahead of time, but understand that this isn’t always possible. Do you want to tie the dentist’s hands together, in the heat of a surgical procedure that is more complicated than expected, just so that a phone call can be made to the insurance to check for coverage only to be on hold, in the middle of your treatment, which might compromise the results?There are many moving parts in the dental office that involves communication. The exam is done, then treatment plan and consultation with the patient, estimates in the form of codes, are entered possibly by various individuals, either dental assistant, front desk staff/ reception/ treatment coordinator, or by the dentist. Sometimes there may be multiple codes depending on what needs to be done, which sometimes you don’t know exactly the ones until you actually do the procedure. Or there may be a procedure/ code that wasn’t anticipated before the procedure, but the dentist ended up needing to do? This stuff isn’t black and white.Then there’s how the estimate was communicated to you. A staff member who guarantees you that your portion is a specific amount will cause a lot of misunderstanding. It would be better to say that the estimate for your portion is approximately this amount. It will also help that whenever possible, the dentist advises the patient if there is a slight change or if additional procedures were required during treatment (not always possible) or when giving post-op instructions. That way, patients are less likely to feel blind-sided.So what you should do, is to return to the office to discuss with the front desk staff or office manager to help you understand the charges billed. You may also need to call the insurance company to understand how they adjudicated the claim, as to have a greater understanding of the non-transparent fine print in the policy. But do also realize that the dentist can’t detail step by step of the procedure to you as it can be quite technical and time consuming. There may be rationale to do a particular step in the procedure, but the patient can’t always understand the nuances of the situation. Then you might get patients who ask to omit certain parts of the treatments that are critical…it’s not a negotiation. Do you want to do it right, do it compromised or not at all?There may be some office financial policy that was signed at some point that might state that the patient is responsible for paying for the services rendered. I do also suggest that you pay for the outstanding balance before you are sent to collections. Not all offices will do that, but some will and it is within their right to do so.